China's soft power: three decades of acceptance, deployment, and transformation

Abstract

Since the Tiananmen incident on June 4, 1989, China has been likely to withdraw a lesson from its failure of using of hard power. In the early 1990s, when “soft power” was first introduced in China, the Chinese Communist Party gradually adopted this concept in order to create the image of a friendly China and a responsible member in international organizations to reassure as well as to lull its neighbors and the U.S. into a peacefully rising China. However, after nearly three decades of being imported and applied in China, the soft power has changed in nature and is no longer identical to the original concept coined by Joseph Nye in 1990. This paper analyzes the process and practice of China's soft power deployment in order to demonstrate that Beijing prefers to integrate elements of hard power into its soft power, thereby examining two new forms of power that have been coined recently to more accurately describe the nature of China’s soft power: smart power and sharp power. The article points out that the strategic motivation for China to exercise the soft power during the first two decades was to conceal its rising ambition as well as in line with the motto of “keeping a low profile” proposed by Deng Xiaoping, and during the latest decade, when having accumulated enough comprehensive national power, China is no longer afraid to reveal its true ambition. The paper uses the research method of synthesizing and analyzing information as well as applies Joseph Nye's power theories.